Posted by: Heinz Brisske
On November 7, 2011, Linda Beale, in her Angry Bear blog, talked about the right’s “nutty” claims about job creation, specifically some of the claims being made by Newt Gingrich and the estate tax.
She claims that the right is intent on promoting a program that will enrich the rich at the expense of the working class. Those claims, she says, are “full of false and nutty claims pitched to fool hard workers who are uninformed about the facts.” She cites Newt Gingrich’s claims that eliminating the estate tax (which applies only to the biggest multimillion dollar estates) will cause all kinds of wondrous economic changes. Her response: “Balderdash.”
She takes the position that, rather being double taxation, “many of the biggest estates represent passage of stock from one generation to another with almost no taxation along the way.”
Bottom line, she says that “keeping the estate tax . . . is the fair thing to do. And it would have a stimulative effect on the economy by providing revenues for governmental infrastructure and other projects. . . . repealing the estate tax would be a further step backward to the robber barons’ gilded age. Let’s not take that step.”
